All or Nothing

A playwright’s search for his feral instincts.

Jez Butterworth has a need to move between country and city, stage and screen.Credit Illustration by Conor Langton

One afternoon in early October, Hugh Jackman strode around a rehearsal space near Times Square, dressed in black and with a scabbard on his hip. The knife in the scabbard was intended for a fish, which, every night from November 16th onward, Jackman will gut, fillet, and season onstage in Jez Butterworth’s new play, “The River.” Part of Jackman’s rightness for the role, Butterworth told me, is his understanding that the sea trout is in some ways the star. “He gets it.”

“The River” can be a tough play to get. It opened in London two years ago, for a limited run at the tiny ninety-seat theatre upstairs at the Royal Court, and is transferring to Broadway’s Circle in the Square, with the role that was played in London by Dominic West now filled by Jackman—“the biggest Broadway star in one of the smallest Broadway theatres,” Butterworth said. This marks a conscious downsizing from his last play, “Jerusalem,” first produced in 2009, and a huge hit. “The River” is a different beast: eighty minutes to “Jerusalem” ’s three hours and contemplative where the earlier play was raucous, turning on the intimacies of a couple rather than the carnival-like energy of a cast of fourteen. The first time I met Butterworth, in New York in the middle of the summer, it was in one of his natural environments, a cool, dark pub, which he entered, on a blazing hot day, wearing an unseasonably warm coat and a gray porkpie hat, with the shambling gait of a man on home turf. He ordered a pint of Guinness and removed his hat, revealing a jagged crest of dark hair streaked with silver, which, along with his black-and-white beard, gave him the look of an affable but vaguely diffident badger. (Butterworth finds the word “badger” hilarious; it crops up all over his plays. In “The Winterling,” for example: “I’m here to tell you, the badger bears a grudge.”)

Butterworth was in the States for a few days for the première of “Get On Up,” a bio-pic of James Brown that he’d written with his younger brother, John-Henry. On returning to London, he would start on a rewrite of the forthcoming James Bond movie. He is in high demand as a screenwriter, a lucrative job that gives him the freedom, in his playwriting, to take risks like “The River.” On paper, at least, “The River” looks aggressively uncommercial, taking place in a remote fishing cabin in rural England and, more accurately, in the figurative space of the leading man’s memory. Hugh Jackman’s character is identified only as The Man, and his girlfriend, The Woman, and a third character, The Other Woman, interchange at key points to represent The Man’s previous relationships. Played wrongly, Jackman told me, The Man could make the audience recoil and think, “Ugh, what a dick.” Played right, “The River” is an almost Gothic play about the influence of past relationships on the present. It is also a play about nature. The action, which occurs over the course of a single evening, describes The Man’s ritual of taking every new girlfriend on a romantic night fishing trip, assuring her that she’s the only woman to have been granted this privilege. The character is not necessarily cynical. “He’s only got one fishing cabin,” Butterworth said. “And it means a lot to him.”

There is a tremor of suppressed mirth behind much of Butterworth’s speech, a note of incredulity played to comic effect. Like the kid who buys himself license by going into an exam claiming not to have studied, he often minimizes his output and sends up the portentousness of being a playwright at all. In September, while we were talking in his apartment in South London, drilling started in the street outside, and Butterworth shouted out the open window, “On behalf of the arts, I command you to stop!” He likes to point out that, at the age of forty-five, he has written only six plays. “I couldn’t call myself a tailor if I’d made six suits. I don’t do anything until it shows up, and when it shows up I’m a playwright and in between I’m not. And the extent to which I’m not, in between, is ridiculous.”

“The River” was well received by critics in London, but no one knows if it will repeat the Broadway success of “Jerusalem,” for which Mark Rylance, in 2011, won a Tony Award for Best Actor as Johnny (Rooster) Byron. Outside the rehearsal space, visitors stood in a windowless room exchanging whispers over a rubble of dirty mugs and spent tea bags while waiting for the actors to take a break. Just before 1 P.M., Sonia Friedman, the producer, entered, in a woolly bobble hat, to join the company for lunch. In London, theatregoers were frustrated by the short run and the small venue, queuing for hours outside the Royal Court only to be turned away. What they didn’t understand, Butterworth said, is that “there would’ve been nothing to go to see if I hadn’t put it on there. I mean, really. It wouldn’t finish itself. I’d go and look at spaces like the Wyndham’s and I’d just think, This isn’t that story.”

The rehearsal room was blocked out to look like the cabin, simply outfitted with a kitchen table, a plastic fish (which will be replaced with a real fish once the play starts its run), and a cabinet full of fishing paraphernalia—feathery lures and hooks. Jackman flashed a purposeful grin at newcomers to the room. “Is there a roll with this?” he said, holding up a plate of salad before sitting down at the kitchen table for lunch with Friedman and Ian Rickson, the play’s director.

Butterworth was not there, although in the early days of the play’s development he was a more frequent visitor to the rehearsal room. He works best under pressure, thriving on the kind of tight deadlines that would paralyze other writers. This gives him, like a lot of his characters, the air of the blagger, that British word for someone with a slightly knowing way of doing things on the fly. During the writing of “Jerusalem,” he took this to the point of finishing the play after rehearsals had started. “The River” had an equally tortured delivery. “I would come with the same part of the play over the course of about a year and a half,” Butterworth said. “We would do the same fucking stuff. I couldn’t get any further with it at all. It was very late in it that I managed to make it work.”

After lunch, I joined Butterworth downtown, in a hotel coffee shop. One gets the impression that, given the choice, he would like to find a less dysfunctional way of working. He recalled watching a Miles Davis interview on YouTube, in which the jazz legend was asked how, having spent years in the seventies doing pretty much nothing, he had managed to return to work: “And he said ‘Dizzy Gillespie came round my house and said “What the fuck are you doing?” and I went back to work.’ ” Butterworth laughed. “I just loved the idea that it’s that simple.”

Jez Butterworth’s apartment, in Borough, near London Bridge, sits at a junction between worlds. From one angle, you can see the Shard, the glittering Renzo Piano-designed tower and monument to the capital’s ritzy excesses; from another, Cross Bones Graveyard, one of the oldest graveyards in London, medieval in origin and once an unconsecrated cemetery for prostitutes, later a paupers’ burial ground. A plaque on the gate reads “The Outcast Dead R.I.P.”

It was early September, and Butterworth, who divides his time between London and a farm in Somerset, had spent the week in conference with Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig, tweaking story lines for the new Bond movie. (He hates corporate limos and had been conveyed every morning to Pinewood Studios, outside London, on the back of a motorbike.) This was Butterworth’s second Bond; he worked on “Skyfall,” too, making the kind of script changes that his twelve-year-old self, watching the movie at the St. Albans Odeon, would be pleased to see. “You know, like Bond doesn’t have scenes with other men. Bond shoots other men—he doesn’t sit around chatting to them. So you put a line through that.”

Butterworth derives comfort and energy from being able to move between states: from city to country and from theatre to screen. This inclination has the added advantage of meaning that no one ever knows quite where he is. He was born less than a mile from Borough, in St. Thomas’s Hospital, but grew up in St. Albans, a commuter-belt town just north of London, in the type of sixties housing development that has come to stand for a certain kind of spiritual death in England. (One neighbor was a salesman for Polaroid. Another neighbor was a salesman for Kerrygold butter. The guy across the road killed rats on the London Underground at night.)

Five kids is above average for that part of the world, and the family stood out. There were always broken-down vehicles outside the Butterworth house. “The house was full of stuff,” Butterworth said. “And it was a mess. And we were a mess.” He said this wryly, but in his plays Butterworth tends to correlate mess with integrity. Butterworth’s father, a former truck driver who, after winning a trade-union scholarship to Ruskin College in Oxford, qualified as a lecturer in industrial relations and economics, met Butterworth’s mother after coming round to fix her gutter. He was nineteen years her senior, a veteran of the Second World War who had been on the landing craft at Omaha Beach, and, like her, was part Irish Catholic. “My dad wanted to batten down the hatches,” he said. “He was a very sweet man and enormously bright and very funny. But very afraid of the outside. His life lessons weren’t about ‘Go West, young man.’ They were ‘Don’t go West, young man. Because you might get shot.’ ”

“Bands, or dreaming up plans,” his eldest brother, Tom, said, of the group dynamic in which they were raised. Of the five Butterworth siblings—four boys, with Jez the second youngest, and one girl, Joanna, the oldest—he and Tom were the first to collaborate, while both were students. John-Henry, seven years Jez’s junior, has worked with him the most, co-writing the bio-pic “Fair Game,” about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, and the sci-fi movie “Edge of Tomorrow.”

“For a long time it was quite adversarial,” John-Henry said, of their early methods. “Lots of storming out and shouting.”

“We would argue over every comma,” Butterworth said. “My working relationship with John-Henry took a seismic leap forward when I abdicated as elder brother. I started to listen to him—the fact that I saw him on the day he was born notwithstanding.”

The undisputed leader of the pack was Joanna, who “featured largely in the role of boss,” John-Henry told me, not least because she had her own bedroom, while the four boys bunked together. She was an inventor of games and stories who introduced her brothers to Roald Dahl and C. S. Lewis, and left clues around the house for buried treasure. “Joanna was extremely good at blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined,” John-Henry said.

Tom introduced Jez to drama. Butterworth visited his older brother at Cambridge and saw him in a student production of Brian Friel’s “Translations,” a classic play of Irish national identity, set in 1833 in County Donegal. “That was the blastoff,” he said. In “Translations,” you see a comic verbosity and linguistic exuberance similar to Butterworth’s achievements in “Jerusalem.” One is aware that there are words Butterworth uses partly because he finds them amusing: prannie, prannock, flapjack, Maypole, Chorleywood, pisshead, and accordion, among others— words he picks up and saves like a magpie. “Jez has got the most incredible memory for dialogue,” John-Henry said. “We’ll be walking around and something will happen, and he’ll take a shine to it and it’ll come up years later. He doesn’t make any notes. He just remembers.”

Unlike most students who harbor the desire to write a play, Butterworth, who followed Tom to Cambridge, sat down and wrote one, a surreal adaptation of a 1961 recipe book by Katharine Whitehorn called “Cooking in a Bedsitter”; he and Tom turned it into a black comedy about student alienation and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (The first person Butterworth auditioned at Cambridge, a fellow-student, was Rachel Weisz. He told me, “I thought, I’m sticking with this.”) James Harding, the director of news and current affairs for the BBC, went to college with Butterworth and would later be his best man. “He behaved at nineteen years old as though he was already famous,” Harding said. “Not in a self-regarding way, but he was extremely unflustered and unbothered about being around grand and famous people. He was the best storyteller there was, night after night, in the Maypole pub.” He had an extraordinary ability to “embellish,” Harding added.

After Edinburgh, a couple of agents expressed interest in the Butterworth brothers, and, eventually, they decided to leave London, where they’d both moved on graduating, and take their writing more seriously. It was the first of Butterworth’s flights to the country, in this case to Pewsey, a small village in Wiltshire. “Part hiding, part escaping,” his brother said. At the end of that period, they had, together, written a TV movie for Channel 4 called “Christmas,” which aired in 1996 without much fanfare, and Butterworth had finished his first full-length play, “Mojo.”

In retrospect, Butterworth is amazed at how casually he pulled this feat off. “It was like, ‘I shall now go off from London and I shall write a play that’s got an interval. It’ll be a proper play and I’ll know what I’m doing before I start.’ And then it happened exactly like that. I gave it in to my agent and I was at the Royal Court two days later and a week after that we had a reading, and that was it. That was the whole process. I moved back to London. It had gone exactly as I had hoped. To a disastrous degree.”

“Mojo” came out of a conversation he’d had with Malcolm McLaren about the relationship between London gangland and the arrival, in the city, of rock and roll, and at the Royal Court it fell into Ian Rickson’s hands. “When you’re finding plays, you’re looking for what is intrinsically theatrical—what in the writing could not be done onscreen,” Rickson said. “It’s about the particular event of theatre, and it had that kind of jazzy, combustible, thrilling way about it.” It was the start of a working relationship, and a friendship, that Butterworth calls the single most important enabler of his work.

“Mojo” was set at a seedy music club in Soho in 1958: dim young goons and wannabe hoods exchange ritualistic banter in the style of early Tarantino—it has lots of abrupt shifts in tone, and its humor turns on the conflation of high and low diction. It is often described as a play about gangsters, but the gangster part is in some ways incidental; it’s as much a piece about friendship and the way members of a group start to speak their own language—playful and exclusionary, giddy at times to the point of nonsense—getting at what Don DeLillo identified, in “Underworld,” as “the hidden triggers of experience, the little delves and swerves that make a state of being.”

At one point, Potts, Goon No. 1, advises Sweets, Goon No. 2, to go to a museum in order to put their jobs as fixers in a historical context.

POTTS: Go down take a look at any picture Napoleon. Go take a butcher’s at the Emperor Half the World. And you’ll see it. You’ll see. They got a lot of blokes standing around. Doers. Finders. Advisors. Acquaintances. Watchers. An entourage.

SWEETS: Big fuckers in fur boots. On the payroll.

POTTS: Napoleon’s chums. And they’re all there. Sticking around. Having a natter. Cleaning rifles. Chatting to cherubs. Waiting. Waiting for the deal to come off.

“Mojo” ended in sudden bloody violence—the kind of rip in the fabric that Butterworth has come to specialize in. When it débuted, in 1995, it caused a sensation.

It was seven years before another play of Butterworth’s was produced. Many found it hard to discern what had happened. He didn’t self-destruct in the obvious ways. He didn’t turn up on red carpets at premières or snort coke in the loo at the Groucho Club. And he looked busy. “Mojo” got made into a film, which Butterworth was invited to direct. (It was released in 1997 and did moderately well—“Too stagebound to be entirely successful,” Variety wrote, in a typical review.) Other screen projects followed, and Butterworth started to develop his parallel career as a sought-after screenwriter.

“But he was definitely not writing another play,” Tom said. “I wasn’t surprised that later, looking back, he said there was a sense of panic. He’d done it once and might not be able to do it again.”

Ian Rickson looked on with concern. “There’s not a lot you can do other than be available—unconditionally there—and maybe offer little provocations,” he said. The biggest problem was tracking him down. “He was like mercury on a bit of glass.”

Butterworth didn’t disappear, though, from his family or friends. Part of his coping strategy was to embed himself in the pub in north London. “There were always periods of his life where he was extremely professionally successful but wasn’t entirely rooted,” James Harding said. “Or periods where he was being pulled by the film industry and not having time for writing plays. He wasn’t so much disguising it in the pub as drinking in the pub.”

“I was completely marooned,” Butterworth said. “I couldn’t write plays. I couldn’t find the time to work. I was spending all of my time just hanging out with friends and waking up with a hangover. And feeling like that was an endless cycle.” His group, those “lovely friends, who are still my friends,” couldn’t help, he said, because “I looked like I didn’t care.” The dry spell lasted until 2002, when he finished his second play, “The Night Heron.” Meanwhile the idea of Rooster Byron started to form in his mind, although it would take many years to cohere. “But at the end of that decade, I wrote a play about someone who spends all their time just drinking and surrounded by the same people.”

On May Day, 2009, Jez Butterworth, Ian Rickson, and Mark Rylance visited the town of Padstow, in Cornwall, two counties west of Butterworth’s farmhouse. The men were trying to drum up ideas for Butterworth’s unfinished play, which would be his fifth and was provisionally called “St. George’s Day,” after England’s national day. May Day, traditionally the first day of spring, is another ancient holiday in England, one observed with a pagan festival going back to Roman times. The celebration includes such largely defunct rites as the crowning of the May Queen and Morris dancing, which no English person can refer to without suppressing a light snigger. In the drizzling rain, they took in Padstow’s pageant, watching townsfolk dance around a Maypole and perform other arcane rituals with the artificial theatricality of a historical reënactment. Nonetheless, the rituals survive, and, even in reduced form, provide some antidote to the sense of modern Britain as a place of characterless small towns presided over by a capital city full of Saudi-financed glass high-rises.

When the men returned to the farmhouse that afternoon, Rickson asked Mark Rylance to read aloud a poem. Rylance, a former artistic director of London’s Globe Theatre, is perhaps best known as a brilliant interpreter of Shakespeare, most recently on Broadway in “Twelfth Night” and “Richard III.” He took a book from the shelf and prepared to read. Butterworth looked on in a state of despair. A month shy of the play’s going into rehearsal, he had spent most of the day bluffing to the other two about how much he had actually written. “Essentially dissembling,” he said recently, still incredulous at the memory. “It was a complete nightmare.”

Although Butterworth was stymied by the new play, he recognized the importance of the farm to his writing. The effect of the countryside on the imagination is a cliché that Butterworth holds to be true. It triggers some instinct that overcomes the layers of self-consciousness which can silence a writer. In 2002, Butterworth married Gilly Richardson, a film editor, and in 2005 they moved to the West of England, first to a small cottage in Devon, and then to the farm in Somerset. They had two children, Mabel and Grace (now eight and five). Butterworth got a dog called Crosby and acquired a flock of sheep and some pigs. He started fishing and walking, and began “digging my way out.”

Describing the post-“Mojo” period, Butterworth quoted Harold Pinter, with whom he’d grown very close. Pinter, who died in 2008, once said that “when you can’t write, you feel you’ve been banished from yourself.” Some of Butterworth’s alienation showed up in the screen work he produced during those years, which also marked the end of his short career as a director. In 2001, he directed and co-wrote with Tom a film called “Birthday Girl,” which was produced by their brother Stephen. It was set on a British housing estate like the one they’d grown up on and starred Nicole Kidman as a mail-order Russian bride, with Ben Chaplin as the weedy bank clerk who buys her, and Vincent Cassel as her boyfriend. Butterworth’s writing is customarily sharp without being cruel, but there is a sneering aspect to “Birthday Girl”—small people, the film implies, living small, silly lives—and the language, in places, feels too dense and inventive for the screen. It is an oddly empty film, and small wonder. The shoot was delayed for six months, because Kidman got injured, and by the end Butterworth was bored and depressed. “I directed two films, and I hated both processes so much,” he said. “It takes so fucking long. It’s like you have to keep telling the same ninety-minute story for four years.”

He revisited the terrain of “Birthday Girl” five years later with his play “Parlour Song,” a more nuanced and sympathetic depiction of the suburbs, in which the location, neither wholly urban nor rural, stands in for a kind of psychological holding place that Butterworth described to me as “nostalgia for the opposite.” Holding two options in one’s mind simultaneously enables an emotional state—of freedom or evasiveness, depending on one’s view—in which Butterworth’s characters tend to reside. “The idea of one constantly feeds the other,” he said. “If you’re in one place, you long to be in the other. Which feels terrific.”

“Parlour Song,” which premièred in New York with the Atlantic Theatre Company in February of 2008, was the last of three plays written by Butterworth over the course of six years. “The Night Heron,” staged at the Royal Court in 2002, and “The Winterling,” put on at the same venue in 2006, both turn on scruffy old blokes having baffling conversations, and the plays won Butterworth comparisons to Beckett and Pinter. He says Pinter’s friendship was as important to him as Pinter’s work, yet he acknowledges that he went through a Pinter “phase,” something he was glad to emerge from. “Harold was such an inspiring man and guiding light, and so relentlessly himself. But a play like ‘The Homecoming’ is fucking horrible—what that is saying about relationships and people. It’s unbelievable and brilliant, and so true. But, Christ, it is horrible.”

“Parlour Song” marked the beginning of Butterworth’s recovering his voice, although none of the three plays received the rapturous reception of “Mojo.” It was a period that John-Henry characterized as Butterworth’s attempt to find a new style for himself and get out from under the influence of Pinter. After the success of “Mojo,” John-Henry said, “he had to reconfigure his ambitions.” He added, “I think that’s a relatively common thing with musicians and stage artists—that they’ll work their way out of stasis by copying something that they love.”

For years, Butterworth had been toying around with “St. George’s Day,” which was partly based on a character he’d met fifteen years earlier, in Pewsey. He wanted to write about England through the lens of a ramshackle guy living in a trailer. It wasn’t working. None of the big speeches had been written, and there was no Act III. In May, 2009, when Rylance and Rickson came to visit, he was years overdue with the final draft, and although the actors had been cast and the Royal Court booked, the end was still not in sight.

Rickson had a hunch that, “like a good chef, if I brought in the Rylance element we’d get in a domain that would really release the flow. And that’s what happened.” Back at the farmhouse, Rickson suggested that Rylance read aloud “Daffodils,” from Ted Hughes’s “Birthday Letters,” his final collection, which drew on his life with Sylvia Plath. It’s a poem about grief, making sudden turns from the gentle depiction of the couple picking flowers “among the soft shrieks / Of their jostled stems” to the savage foreshadowing of death: “wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth, / With their odourless metals.”

Rickson and Butterworth had spoken in the past of their admiration for Hughes, and “Daffodils,” in which human experience is rooted in the cycles of the natural world, overlapped with the themes of Butterworth’s play. Hearing Rylance read, Butterworth said, ignited an ambition to write something equal to Rylance’s talent. He renamed the play “Jerusalem,” after the William Blake poem, adapted by Hubert Parry into a popular hymn that is sung on St. George’s Day. It provides a sort of bathos: the grandest expression of Englishness is used to describe the goings on of a group of drifters.

“Had that not happened, we probably wouldn’t be sitting here talking about it,” he said of Rylance’s reading. “It had such a fundamental effect, because you were suddenly aware of what this person was capable of. You knew the second that it began that what you were hearing was the poem; it was the clearest transmission. It came through on the clearest frequency, and I had never experienced anything like it in my life. It was like hearing Aretha Franklin sing.”

If you missed “Jerusalem” when it was onstage, the only way to see it is to go to Blythe House, in West London, a grand outpost of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Butterworth doesn’t like plays on film—he compares them to “being told about a dinner party that you weren’t at”—and he refused to give permission for a commercial DVD of the production.

In a small room, on a tiny TV, you are able to watch one of the most requested DVDs in the V. & A.’s collection, recorded at the Royal Court in 2009. Even under such circumstances, “Jerusalem” is extraordinary. It is also very long, leaving one bleary-eyed and a little blasted, wandering down Hammersmith Road to be asked by security guards, “You all right, love?”

“Jerusalem” is devastating in the way that, say, a Stevie Smith poem is devastating: it nails that lightning swerve from comic to tragic and trivial to meaningful, so that the audience feels, at certain points, as if it had plunged through a trapdoor. The hero, Rooster Byron, is a petty drug dealer, liar, shagger, all-round rogue, and venerable pisshead in the English style, whose great unwinding speeches start out vaguely Shakespearean—“Friends! Outcasts. Leeches. Undesirables”—and end with something more akin to the Sex Pistols: “God damn the Kennet and Avon. Fuck the New Estate!” As with most Butterworth plays, outwardly nothing much happens—the story is of a man getting evicted from his trailer in a forest in the southwest of England. Rooster and the teen-agers who hang around his trailer summon a world on the fringes, which tells us precisely why the center isn’t holding.

The early version, “St. George’s Day,” had foundered when Butterworth tried too hard to make it about the state of England. It was “very raw,” Rylance said. “I’ve always felt he writes very subconsciously and at a kind of feral, almost animal level.” It was only when Butterworth abandoned his grand plans that he ushered in the very elements he thought he’d abandoned: “Jerusalem” was widely taken as a commentary on English national identity, that ambiguous mixture of bravado, self-abasement, and sardonic pride in which pretending to be a shambles provides cover for keener movements.

“Jerusalem” is also a play about kindness. When, toward the end, Rooster is brutally beaten by thugs from the village, one implicitly understands it to be a statement about how marginal figures are treated by the mainstream. Like so many of Butterworth’s characters, including James Brown in this year’s bio-pic, Rooster is full of shit. He is also touching and warm, broken and tender, self-mythologizing and self-mocking. “Riches. Fame. A glimpse of God’s tail,” he says, in one of his wild speeches. “Comes a time you’d swap it all for a solid golden piss on English soil.”

The difference between a play that works and one that doesn’t is infinitesimal and huge. For Butterworth, something is working when “the connections that I normally make accelerate, and you’re suddenly in a state where you’re making them all over. And it becomes a play.” Butterworth knew “Jerusalem” was good because he wrote it in a blur and revised every day during rehearsal. “I didn’t feel defensive,” he said. “I was open to the process. And something strange was going on, where you’re working at a speed you’re not capable of on a normal day. A madness you slip into. But it can be really beneficial.” (Butterworth is less fun to work with when he’s on an unsure footing. During the rewriting of the movie “Edge of Tomorrow,” he lashed out at Doug Liman, the director, who recalled that “almost immediately afterward Jez said, ‘You know, if I ever attack you again personally, you should just know that means I know I’m wrong.’ ”)

“Jerusalem” transformed the way people thought about Butterworth. Ben Brantley, in a review of the Broadway production in the Times, said, “It thinks big—transcendently big—in ways contemporary drama seldom dares.” The play and its performances had left him in a state of “glassy-eyed rapture.”

A few years ago, Butterworth went to an exhibition of Robert Capa photos in New York. Capa’s contact sheets were on display, and you could see the pictures leading up to each famous shot. The differences between photos came down to a matter of milliseconds, yet, Butterworth said, “the one before, that is so nearly the shot that rings like a bell forever,” had no resonance at all. “And it taught me something about the difference between nearly and really. Those days where you’re looking at a page and thinking this is an imitation of itself—it could be as close as the frame before the actual one, and it’s nothing. It’s nothing.”

The Butterworth kitchen in Somerset is a riot of kids’ shoes, dishes, books, plants, two Aga ranges, and cats flopping about on the flagstone floor. On the wall of the downstairs loo there’s a poster for the movie “Airplane!” with a note from Jerry Zucker, one of the directors, scrawled across it: “Jez—please forgive me for corrupting your childhood. If I had only known how impressionable you were.” The farmhouse was Butterworth’s retreat in the months after “Jerusalem” opened. The play won two Olivier Awards and transferred to Broadway (where it lost out to “War Horse” for Best Play at the Tonys). When Butterworth finally got back to his desk, he once again faced the challenge of unseating a hit.

He had a more secure base from which to fight it this time. The farm is strikingly situated, with Exmoor National Park behind it and rolling fields in front, where the River Exe meets the River Barle to almost moatlike effect. In September, Butterworth greeted me at the door, bouncing lightly on his toes and wearing the accessories of youth—or, rather, of the parent of young daughters who force one to wear their hand-crafted string bracelets.

It was a Saturday morning, a few days after our meeting in London, and Butterworth was back in Somerset for the weekend. (Butterworth and his wife recently split up.) He took me to his writing shed, two fields north of the farmhouse, stopping halfway up the hill to explain the counterintuitive effect of the landscape; namely, that “you can walk the dog in a circle and never leave the river.” Butterworth pointed out a goat named Boy, “who is a girl”—his daughters named her—and Dogger, the last of a flock of sheep named after areas of the Shipping Forecast, a weather report for British coastal regions read out on the BBC, like a national liturgy. Early on, one of the sheep died shortly after birth. Butterworth buried it, but something dug it up in the night. “The first lesson you learn is that you’ve got to dig them deep,” he said. The livestock have been radically reduced over the past few years. “Now it’s down to a few animals,” Butterworth said. “The chickens mostly got killed by the fox.”

The cabin is furnished with a single bed, a desk, and three chairs. There is no toilet. Butterworth sat in the armchair, kicked off his boots, and curled one bare foot over the other. The view from his desk looked down over fields toward a cottage, not far from the house. It was there, during the year he was finishing “The River,” that his sister, Joanna, lived after being given a diagnosis of brain cancer. Before her illness, she had been working in London as the registrar at LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but had always wanted to live in the country. At night, when Butterworth looked up from his desk, he could see the light in Joanna’s room.

If the intimate setting of “The River” had an immediate precedent, it wasn’t in any of Butterworth’s plays but in “Fair Game,” the 2010 film about Valerie Plame, the ex-C.I.A. agent, and her husband, Joe Wilson, the former Ambassador, which Butterworth wrote and produced while finishing “Jerusalem.” In the run-up to the second Iraq war, Wilson was sent to Niger to investigate the possibility that it was selling yellowcake uranium to Saddam Hussein, and his public protest over the use, or misuse, of his findings by the Bush government led to his wife’s exposure.

Butterworth is not political. His response to the conflict (“I didn’t think we should have been at war in Iraq, and I think that’s being borne out right now. It’s the Pottery Barn rule: if you break it, you own it”) wasn’t the reason he said yes, or why Doug Liman, the director, hired him. Both men were primarily interested in the dynamic of the marriage between Plame and Wilson, played by Naomi Watts and Sean Penn; Butterworth and John-Henry depicted the union as both tender and fraught with conflicting egos.

Responses to the film were mixed, but Butterworth makes no apology for avoiding the political controversy. It is a question, he said, of “knowing what you’re good at” and where your genuine interests lie. “After meeting Valerie and—I can’t remember his name, whatever his name was; I love that I can’t remember his name, I’m such a prick—the character Sean played, they were in such a compelling situation because he needed the world to know who he was and she desperately needed the world not to know who she was. You could tell the second he walked into the room that he was desperate for this, and she didn’t want it to happen.”

Butterworth worked on several scripts during this period, among them “Get On Up,” and he returned to “The River” in a different mood. Living in the countryside had, to that point, made him think of the “unbelievably visceral” horror of the natural world, the fact that two feet from his door “there’s this godless game playing itself out.”

Lately, something else had struck him. “If all those winds are blowing in one direction, then there’s one wind blowing in the opposite direction, and it might be called mercy,” he said. “That you are capable of not eating the thing in front of you, that you’re not just driven by the same relentless maths. There’s some other quality there. And what is it doing there? What is that idea? Is it just an extension of how we protect our larger needs?”

Butterworth’s parents, lapsed Catholics, considered religion foolish, and he used to agree. Whether or not he had now become religious was irrelevant, he said. “My brain was. My brain had been set up around all these rituals and observances for tens of thousands of years before me, that would respond to the sun and the moon in numinous terms, that would respond to hunting, and to births and deaths in those terms, whether or not I thought it was nuts,” he said. “It’s why story is there in the first place.”

It’s one of the ideas of the play—that the conversion of life into myth, the act of curating one’s own experience, is a defining aspect of what it is to be human. The day Butterworth finished writing “The River,” his sister died. The play is dedicated to her. Afterward, he said, “I suddenly couldn’t believe how many brothers I had. It had never seemed like that.”

And what of grief? “The main thing that you learn from grief is that you might as well try and get over it, because it’s coming around the mountain again. It’s just going to come, and come, and come, and come, and when you go it’s somebody else’s problem.”

In “The River,” Butterworth wanted all the dramatic elements pared down. No pyrotechnics, no flights of verbosity, but a singular story about the way people love each other. “A lifetime’s work, to try and say one thing that’s true.”

It comes down, in the end, to a question of structure. Butterworth has an image in his head of a play without plot, in which, like a good relationship, the balance is achieved through equal weight distribution. “It’s almost like nails in a building,” he says. “If you could put it together with none and just make everything lean on everything else, it would be perfect.”

There is a risk that “The River” will infuriate audiences. Some will arrive expecting “Jerusalem.” Others will be there for Wolverine. Hugh Jackman, who described the play to me as a piece of “chamber music,” hopes they remain open-minded. “I love people coming in not knowing what to expect,” he said. “If that means someone who goes to every X-Men movie comes to see me playing a fly fisherman trying to sort out his relationships, fantastic.”

Quite apart from taking pride in the show, Butterworth is pleased with “The River” for reasons of perversity. He talked about Neil Young, one of his musical heroes, following up his hit album of 1972, “Harvest,” with a series of more muted records, among them “Tonight’s the Night.” He said, “He’s playing ‘Tonight’s the Night’ to an English audience, and they’re screaming at him for songs off ‘Harvest’ and they’re all off ‘Tonight’s the Night,’ and at the end he goes, ‘I’m going to play you something you’ve heard before,’ and they all cheer, and he played ‘Tonight’s the Night.’ Again.”

For Butterworth, the continuity is in the people around him. Writing a play is hard enough. “It’s like going deep-sea diving. You wouldn’t want to do that on your own.” ♦

Emma Brockes, the author of “She Left Me the Gun,” writes for the Guardian and the Guardian US.